


Homo Sacer

by unveiled



Category: Marvel (Comics), X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Police, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Bigotry, Children, Comics Characters, Developing Relationship, Families of Choice, Multi, Murder, Police Procedural, Politics, Siblings, Telepathy, Torture, Violence, fathers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-16
Updated: 2012-04-20
Packaged: 2017-11-03 19:06:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/384834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unveiled/pseuds/unveiled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a not too distant future, Detective Erik Lehnsherr meets Charles Xavier: street magician, former academician, and telepath.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Much thanks to mrkinch for beta-reading a draft of this monster, and horusporus for looking through it and giving her impressions — their comments were invaluable and made this thing much better than it would otherwise have been. Any remaining mistakes are mine.
> 
> This story was very much inspired by fond memories of _Homicide: Life of the Street_. I've taken liberties with the US justice system, in particular the investigation procedures and criminal law of the state of New York, and aspects of mainstream education system. **See end notes for more detailed content descriptions of the tags**.

> The sacred man [ _homo sacer_ ] is the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide; in the first tribunitian law, in fact, it is noted that "if someone kills the one who is sacred according to the plebiscite, it will not be considered homicide." This is why it is customary for a bad or impure man to be called sacred.  
>  — Pompeius Festus, _On the Significance of Words_

Monday began with a body, sprawled across a lifeboat floating gently down the Hudson River like the opening scene of a tragicomic sketch. The dead man's face was slack, almost peaceful, but for the jagged chunk of wood protruding out of his chest. Erik took one look at the man's red skin and the tail hanging over the edge into the water, and swore loudly and colourfully — in several languages.

The pathologist working the crime scene glared at him. 

"Without an autopsy I can't say for sure, but it looks like we have both the murder weapon and the cause of death here," he said to Erik's partner, pointedly turning away from Erik as he glanced at the piece of wood. "The guy went through a lot before he died — there's extensive bruising and he's missing two fingernails. He might've been trying to scratch his way out of somewhere, god knows. We'll send him over to the ME's office."

"Thanks," said Angel. Today she matched her habitual black slacks with a jaguar print top, which Erik privately felt took the escalation of hostilities against Mondays a step too far. "Alex getting this one?"

"Yeah. It's gonna drive him nuts — you know he hates doing autopsies on mutants."

"Damn. One more hour and it'd be Sean trying to sweet-talk him instead of Mr. Crankymagnet."

Erik glowered at her. The fearsome sight had driven many a rookie to give him wide berth, but Angel Salvadore was well-trained in the art of ignoring anything he didn't actually verbalise. Instead she marched off to take the statement of the jogger who called in the police, a sweet-faced young woman with frizzy black hair and an NYU sweatshirt.

He looked down at the dead man, wondering if his physical appearance was the only thing his mutation gifted him. Unlikely, though not impossible. The man carried no identification, no wallet — but his clothing looked tailor-made, fitting him perfectly. Erik peered closer, following the fine stitching on the lapel of the jacket. It had real silver buttons, large and showy, the surface etched with a stylised Chalcidian helmet.

"You should speak to the man who paid for those."

That was how Erik Lehnsherr met Charles Xavier for the first time: startled and off-balance, discombobulation slotting neatly into suspicion once the man's words registered fully in his mind. Charles was about half a head shorter than Erik, dressed in a black wool overcoat layered over a faded denim jacket. His threadbare shirt gaped open to reveal a pale, muscular neck. He was too clean to be one of the homeless, but his patchy stubble and generally unkempt condition looked like genuine neglect rather than a bohemian artifice. 

The air around him hummed like a mistuned radio, setting Erik's teeth on edge. His blue eyes were intense, beautiful. Erik wasn't fooled for a second.

"Who the fuck are you?"

"Charles Xavier. Please, call me Charles." The man cocked an eyebrow. His accent was pure Received Pronunciation — incongruous this far off the tourist-slash-expat beat of New York, and Erik made a mental note to ask for his visa later. "And you're Detective Erik Lehnsherr. Hello. I didn't murder the poor man, but I did feel him die."

Involuntarily, Erik's skin puckered into gooseflesh. "You're, what? An empath? A telepath?"

"A telepath, I'm afraid."

"Then you know any statement you give as evidence is worthless in court." Erik knew he was being cruel, but god save him from well-meaning naïfs. "And it still doesn't mean you're off the suspect list."

Charles smiled, unconcerned. Erik found himself wishing that Charles would break past the police tape, to give Erik an excuse to arrest and interrogate him. Irritating asshole, if a handsome one. Charles must have heard him, despite prohibitions on telepathic scanning without consent, because he gave a soft laugh and turned to leave.

"I'd best be off, then."

Erik growled. "Wait—"

"Leave him alone, Lehnsherr. He's harmless." Angel ducked under tape and touched Charles on the shoulder. Her face looked strange to Erik's eyes, until he realised that what he saw there was affection, and an unfamiliar kindness. "How're you doing, Professor? You still shacked up with that ex-Marine?"

Charles shook his head. "He left. It's all right, though. Raven made me promise to stay where she put me."

"Bet you she said not to go around wandering outside your head, too." Angel frowned at Charles, but benevolently, as if indulging a favourite grandparent. "We'll check out your lead, but Prof — be careful, okay? I'm not making you swear to stop with this stuff, but you aren't helping anybody if you get killed or they put on you on drugs again."

Charles curled a hand around Angel's fingers and placed his other hand atop hers, squeezing warmly. "All right. Take care, my dear. By the way, I think your man's name is Azazel."

"Who _is_ he?" Erik said, once Charles trundled off past the gawping spectators and the journalists circling the scene.

"I keep forgetting you're kinda new here. Charles is—" Angel paused. "He's a street magician. Does shows for tourists."

"He's a telepath, Salvadore. What the fuck is he doing making beans disappear under paper cups?"

She gave him a sidelong look. The dragonfly wings on her back shivered under her skin. "He used to be an actual professor — tutored me in college. Anyway, that's history. You just understand this: don't hassle him."

Erik's eyebrows rose. "I doubt _he_ 's the one in need of protection, in such an event."

"That's the thing." Angel watched as the body was carted away. "He won't fight back. Not for himself. So we look out for him, and he looks out for us."

*****

Erik was curious enough to start digging immediately. By lunchtime he'd amassed a few more chunks of information about Charles Xavier, courtesy of Oliver Black, Sean Cassidy's partner and fount of institutional memory. Black was hailed for his steady hand and unending patience for newly-minted Detectives, which meant he was the natural choice to make sure that Cassidy survived to enjoy his next pay grade.

"We have an agreement with Dr. Xavier." Black looked conflicted. "It was Lt. MacTaggert who laid it down. Verbally, no paper trail. We can't use his testimony in court, so we treat it like a phoned-in lead from 'a concerned member of the public'." He made quotation marks with his fingers. "And we damn well do the work, dot our _I_ s and cross our _T_ s — no one's ever been convicted with evidence obtained directly from Xavier."

"That's bullshit semantics," Erik said.

"You know it, I know it." Black didn't look entirely sorry, though. "Xavier only pokes his nose in when the victim's a mutant or — sometimes — when it's a young woman. Says they remind him of his sister."

Erik looped a chain of paperclips around the handle of his coffee mug, then carefully unattached each clip while keeping all of them suspended in air, for the fun of it. He used to do this at the academy when bored, and the habit stuck.

"It doesn't explain why he is what he is now."

Black sighed. "I never heard the entire story. Salvadore won't say a word. Best that you ask him yourself — you're a mutant, he's probably more willing to talk to you." Erik stood up, making the other man blink. "You're asking him now?"

"No. I have a lunchtime appointment."

*****

Erik took the train to 47th Street and walked to the restaurant, dodging diplomatic staff and harried-looking interns with UN passes still clipped to their jackets. Ororo had chosen a Japanese restaurant for their lunch, which he had a feeling was motivated as much from the desire to play sly joke on him as from her genuine enjoyment of the cuisine. He eyeballed the kimono-clad usher at the door, who calmly gave him a once-over, did a silent calculation in her head, and asked, "May I help you, sir?"

"I have reservations under the name Ororo Munroe."

She consulted her clipboard. "This way, please."

He moved to New York for Ororo, but between his job and her travelling, a simple lunch between two friends sometimes took weeks of advanced scheduling. Seeing her again after months of little to no contact was always a shock to his system, plunging into a world of unintelligible acronyms, where terms like "operationalisation" were used without irony. Ororo herself was entirely unlike his colleagues in the force. She was physically striking — tall and graceful, with smooth dark skin and a luxurious head of white hair — but even without the visible marker of her mutation she could easily fill any room with a serene, open-hearted strength of will. 

Erik and Ororo met at university, where they dominated the Mutant Students' Association with arguments ( _debates_ , Ororo would say) that once nearly caused the other students to take up a petition barring them from interacting for an entire term. Erik ran with the Homo Superior group, Ororo coordinated solidarity actions with activists — mutant and non-mutant alike. He ended up joining the police force and she became a human rights advocate who regularly butted heads with governments, which probably said more about how they influenced each other than they were comfortable admitting.

"Erik! Hello, old friend." Ororo kissed him on the cheek in greeting, accompanied by a waft of jasmine and sandalwood. It smelled a little like a homecoming. "How are you?"

He shrugged. "The usual. And you?"

"I was glad to say goodbye to Geneva — this research has been delayed for too long, and I have put off other commitments to give it my fullest attention." She tilted her head at him, one hand arrested in motion. " _Something_ has happened to you today."

"I hate how well you know me."

"The sentiment is returned in kind."

Erik poured out the tea. On impulse, he asked, "Do you know a Dr. Charles Xavier?"

Her eyes widened. "Yes, but how did you—"

"He's what happened to me today." Erik looked down at the menu. "Ororo, how the hell are you even able to afford this lunch?"

"Yukio is paying. As you know, she has had a very successful solo exhibition." Her smile was all feline satisfaction and silent laughter. "She sends her apologies for her absence. After all, she was very much looking forward to lunch and listening to your discourse on how a flatscan human will bring me to ruin."

He moved Yukio to the back of his mental queue — for now — and homed in on a far more important question, "Who's Charles Xavier and why haven't I heard of him?"

Ororo picked up her tea cup and sipped at it, brows puckering. "I first met him when I joined HRW's Mutant Rights Program. You were already in Israel at that point. I thought of contacting you over the Psi Bill, as a matter of fact, but it seemed... heartless, to cut into your time with Edie."

Their server interrupted them to take their orders, but Erik was glad for the momentary distraction. Remembering his mother still made him ache with rage and grief — that she died too soon; that his last memory couldn't have been them listening to Otis Redding exulting _all you gotta do is try, try a little tenderness_ in her hospital room, rather than the wail of a life support machine and her gaunt, sunken face. He'd taken leave from the force and his relationship with Anna Marie, ignoring everything that didn't have to do with his mother. In the end, he came home to a world that had turned strange and alien around him, a void yawning bloodily between himself and his former life.

Anna Marie broke up with him two months after his mother's death. She thought it was the only way to get through the carapace that had built up around his heart, but nothing moved him them, not even her tears and the dents left behind where she punched the wall. What did the trick was time, and careening from one spectacular fuck-up to another in his private life, culminating in the entire mess with Magda.

"Xavier was a public opponent of the bill," Ororo said, once they were alone at their table. "Mutants were split on the issue: no one wanted to be the latest casualty of the war on terror, but few were unperturbed by the idea of telepaths reading their thoughts with impunity. It was a terrible mess, Erik."

"Where did you stand on it?"

"I thought, and I still do, that we don't need a law giving the authorities wide-ranging regulatory and surveillance powers over psionic mutants. With very few checks and balances. Specific, precise amendments to criminal laws at the state level would be far better in addressing actual concerns." She sighed. "Unfortunately, the timing of the bill coincided with the Revanche case. Public sentiment is difficult to battle."

Erik winced. "You can't argue the Psi Act had much of an impact," he said, partly to be contrary. "The only way to tell for certain if a telepath scanned someone's head without consent is still when he admits to it, or if another telepath catches him."

"You're underestimating its indirect consequences," Ororo said, slowly, as if she was feeling her way through. "It is fair to tell a telepath not to invade another person's mind. It is unfair to then not give her the means to learn how to, but nonetheless expect her to adhere to the boundaries we set for her. For every Emma Frost, who had the access and money for extensive psi training, there's a telepath getting by with inhibitor drugs."

"What happened to Xavier?"

"Charles resigned from his position after the university discovered he was training a group of young mutants in the use of their abilities. He disappeared completely. I write to him once in a while to tell him when I've changed addresses — he sends me New Year cards."

The server returned with their lunch. Erik stared down at the exquisite arrangement of lacquered bowls, and said, struck by a sudden thought, "I suspect my partner was one of his trainees."

"He never divulged their names," she said. "I've met two — I cannot tell you who they are, so don't think of asking — and neither was willing to share overmuch about the training. Detective Salvadore is unlikely to be any more forthcoming."

Erik's phone buzzed. "Speak of the devil," he muttered, and took the call. "Lehnsherr speaking."

_"Sorry to interrupt your hot lunch date, but the DA's office called us in for a meeting. The homicide this morning."_

"Shit. Can you pick me up at 47th Street? Near Lexington."

 _"Text me the address."_ Angel hung up.

"Duty calls," he said to Ororo, shoveling food into his mouth as quickly as he could. She very kindly did not comment on his manners, and even keyed in the address of the restaurant into his phone to send to Angel.

*****

Erik knew as soon as he walked into the meeting room that he and Angel were well and truly fucked: Bernadette Rosenthal, the Chief Assistant DA, didn't get involved in run-of-the-mill homicide cases. He was already half-expecting to see Blake Tower from the Trial Division, but the presence of Armando Muñoz — who led the Investigation Division — was another surprise, further cementing his pessimism.

Rosenthal was rumoured to be running for District Attorney after Foggy Nelson's retirement, and if she won Muñoz would almost certainly be appointed Chief Assistant DA. Muñoz was a mutant, a polymath, and gloved a sharp legal mind with the deceptive velvet of affability. He was marked for greatness and ambition early on, and for his sins was once named one of New York's most eligible bachelors. His marriage to one Dr. Alex Summers, former juvenile delinquent turned intemperate medical examiner, was one of those talked-about society events Erik became thoroughly sick of. Wedding photos made Erik prickly.

"Detectives," Rosenthal said. "Please take a seat."

Erik would've preferred to stand, but Angel readily slid into a plush office chair, crossing her legs and staring at the other three with a look that all but said, _bring it_. He sat next to her, fixing his gaze on a spot just above and behind Tower's left ear. Sure enough, Tower soon started fidgeting, trying his hardest not to turn around. Erik buried his smirk.

"Thanks for coming in, Detectives. We appreciate it," said Muñoz.

"Why _are_ we here?" Erik said. "We haven't even identified the body yet."

"The man you retrieved from the Hudson this morning is of special interest to us: he's Ilya Volkov, also known as Azazel, Sebastian Shaw's right-hand man. He's a teleporter."

Angel's shoulders tensed into a hard line, the visible veins of her wings bulging out slightly through the skin of her arms. Erik wondered at the reaction, even as he sifted through his memory for what he knew of Sebastian Shaw. Mutant, manifesting as slowed aging. Former Senator, of the generation before Metahuman Abilities Education was instituted. Owner of a number of businesses, including a private military company. Made a policy of hiring mutants.

Muñoz probably wasn't happy that he was the designated storyteller to two lowly detectives, but if so, his smile didn't give anything away. "We've been cooperating with the NYPD OCCB and the FBI for almost a year now, investigating Shaw's business dealings. We were tipped on possible money-laundering — turns out Shaw was involved in a hell of a lot more."

He flipped open a brown folder. Photos spilled out onto the table: Shaw and Volkov, Shaw talking to a woman Erik recognised as a mutant informant, Shaw and a handsome, dark-haired young man. A blue-skinned woman talking to Shaw outside a bar, gesticulating at the sign. Suspected crime lords. Shots at parties alongside various politicians and businesspeople with drinks in their hands, doing their best to appear important. And, finally, a gallery of death: men and women killed execution-style, charred bones photographed in blackened ruins, bodies splayed out on concrete pavements in halos of blood.

Rosenthal reached across and tapped the last set of photographs with the tips of her fingernails. "The apparent suicides were largely telepaths and empaths," she said. "Suicide rates among them are unusually high even without a nudge from Shaw, so no one made the connection at first." 

Muñoz made a soft sound in his throat. Rosenthal glanced at him and smiled wryly.

"Except for Muñoz, but there was no evidence to pursue that line of inquiry. Then one of the victims — Astrid Bloom — lodged a police report before she died, complaining about being harassed by two men: a red-skinned mutant who spoke with a Russian accent and a white man wearing a strange helmet. The first is obviously Volkov, but the second is unknown to us."

"What does Shaw want with them?" Angel said. She picked up a photo of Volkov, making circles on the shiny surface with a finger.

Muñoz spread his hands. His eyes, when they looked at Angel, were unexpectedly kind. "Your guess is as good as ours. He was a senator when the Psi Act was passed — but he was the only one who abstained."

*****

Angel would not be prodded into talking, despite the effort Erik managed to dredge up, huddling into herself all through the walk to their car. She handed the keys to him and said, "You drive. Dr Summers says he wants to see us when we're done here."

She busied herself texting to someone, fingers moving so rapidly on her phone that Erik felt old just looking at her. He let the silence sit uneasily between them as he drove, feeling unreasonably annoyed.

"I gotta check on Charles," Angel said suddenly. "You okay with getting back on your own after we see Summers?"

"He's a grown man, Salvadore. He can wait a few hours until your shift's over," he growled. "Even if he can't, I'm your fucking partner. I'm fine with sitting in the car while you see to it that no one's drowning him in the bath."

"Yeah, well. Thanks," she muttered.

Erik wondered if Charles was the reason Angel joined the police force. Assuming his suspicion was correct, that Angel had been one of the mutants Charles personally trained and not just another undergraduate in his lectures. Charles Xavier must have been very charismatic, once upon a time — he was still an attractive man, Erik thought uncomfortably, and his troubling lack of boundaries only perversely added to his charms. In a different world, he would be sitting pretty in an intelligence agency somewhere outside the USA, a telepathic James Bond clothed in professorial tweeds.

Mutants made up a disproportionate percentage of personnel in law enforcement agencies and emergency services, Erik knew. They were the first employers to embrace mutants whole-heartedly, even actively competing for recruits with desirable abilities. Growing up, Erik listened to interviews of mutant police officers and firefighters talking about the joys of usefulness, and had sneered at them. He'd known the truth even then: these were the few jobs that let mutants be mutant and _normal_ at the same time, where the ability to set shit on fire with a thought could be passed off as just another day in the office.

They should never have settled for normalcy, for integrationist education and a token mutant kid on Sesame Street. Erik had liked his MAE classes in school. Most mutants he knew did. It was school-sanctioned playtime, and you only had to turn in a paper if your ability couldn't be used in a self-designed project. Or if your control was so poor, the only thing you could be trained in was how to _not_ use your ability.

Then you went out into the real world and realised how very different it was from a classroom with a comfortingly sympathetic teacher. MAE taught the basics of control, how to minimise accidental and casual usage of one's ability so as not to afflict the comfortable. It dressed up the lessons in aspirations to the American Dream. You, young mutant, could be _anything_ , if only you did it right. Then you ended up shivering in a thermal blanket at the back of an ambulance while a stranger stared at the twisted wreckage of your family home and said, _damn, kid, if you failed MAE you should've asked for inhibitor drugs_ , and felt _anything_ shrivel into nothing even as you wanted to say: _but I aced every fucking test_. 

Erik went into law enforcement because mutants deserved better than to be policed by flatscan humans. Ororo had been quietly thoughtful when he told her, and only said, later, "You will find, my friend, that many non-mutants too were failed by those who should have served them better."

*****

Dr. Alex Summers was, in the estimation of most media junkies lacking actual contact with him, a kind of anti-hero and redemption narrative rolled into one leather-wearing ME. Tragic all-American orphan, juvie at 15, difficulty controlling his mutant ability, Summers turned out to be a better fighter outside the glass-littered car lots of his adolescence. He made it into medical school, to a chorus of shocked disbelief, and then again surprised everyone by specialising in forensic pathology, all while cultivating a series of tattoos, rousing battles against The Man, and unfortunate relationship choices. And, to cap it all off, he married a fast-rising legal star after a very public courtship. He even had the requisite adopted baby girl.

The men and women of the NYPD knew him as the meanest asshole in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Summers had an unerring ability to zero in on emotional weak spots and hot buttons, no matter how experienced the officer. Veterans still spoke darkly of The Great Meltdown and the subsequent plot to punch him repeatedly in the face. Sadly for their sinister plans, aside from having Muñoz as his lawfully-wedded spouse, Summers's older brother happened to be Scott Summers, bodyguard and valued consigliere of Emma Frost, hive queen of the Frost Group. Alex Summers was a lot of bark before a sharp bite, but Summers the Elder would cut you down without so much as a giveaway twitch in his appealingly sculptural jawline.

Erik _hated_ Alex Summers.

"What's up with all the hating? Alex doesn't give a shit about you either way," Angel said to him once, after a particularly snippy encounter.

"I know," Erik said in return, glowering. "That makes it _worse_ , Salvadore."

Erik had to give Summers this, though: for all the disparaging bullshit he liked to spew against anyone with a badge, Dr Summers was good with victims' families — he took the time to break things down into a layperson's language, even if he wasn't particularly gentle or empathetic. No one had ever witnessed him treating the bodies he autopsied with anything less than respect. He never lost his shit over difficult cases. He didn't take shortcuts with documentation. Once upon a time someone had clearly taught him the value of meticulousness and precision, and the lesson stuck in incongruity with a stubbornly unpolished facade.

He was finishing up another autopsy when they arrived, so they waited in the chilly corridors outside the mortuary, Angel pacing up and down on the scuffed tiles. Erik watched the steady tip-tapping of her sensible pumps and wondered what else she was hiding from him, whether he'd have to watch his back.

"Hey, doc," she said to Summers once he finally emerged, looking washed out under the fluorescent lighting. "I thought you were gonna quit your job."

"Armando says he won't pay for my student loans," Summers said, with a grin that just showed his teeth. "Raising a kid is expensive."

For reasons he never cared to explain, Summers treated Angel better than anyone else in the NYPD. It was likely because she could spit acid into his face, Erik thought. Certainly it had nothing to do with both of them being mutants — Summers only seemed to tolerate Erik by his proximity to Angel, and was even less gracious to others of his kind in the force.

"Your vic this morning," Summers said, "there's not much to say until the lab's done with the tests. He died from a stab wound to the chest — that piece of wood went almost straight through."

"Could he have fallen _onto_ it?" Erik said.

"Maybe, but I doubt it. Not with his other injuries." Summers hesitated. "Some of the bruises on his body were large and irregular, others looked like they were caused by something long and tubular. Not fists. We're not talking a couple of bruises here and there — he's _covered_ with them. The injuries to his hands? Probably self-defense. He couldn't have moved very far if he wanted to, by the time he died."

"He's supposed to be a teleporter," Angel said. "What's been done to him that he can't get out of the way?"

"His murderer could be telekinetic," said Erik. "Or he could've been drugged."

Summers shrugged. "Like I said, wait till toxicology's done. He was otherwise healthy, I can tell you that much. Could've done with less drinking."

"Thanks, Summers," Erik said, dressing up his vowels with bland courtesy.

Deliberately, Summers nodded at Angel, a smile of satisfied malice on his face. "See, told you he can be trained."

The steel pin holding Summers's ID rattled against his chest. Angel looked to be seriously considering smacking him and Erik upside the head.

*****

Angel's face all but telegraphed that she expected Erik to object to their detour when she told him where Charles lived. He would've, on any other day, but Erik was sick of feeling as if he'd been parachuted into the middle of a le Carre novel and told to put together obscure clues. So he let Angel drive them to Queens and kept his counsel, staring out at the urban landscape from the passenger seat.

Charles Xavier lived in one of the smaller co-ops in Jackson Heights, on a street lined with hybrid cars. Erik idled away his wait by people-watching and reading the newspaper, while Angel presumably made sure that Charles hadn't been gruesomely murdered. The front page of the Daily Bugle was taken up by a breathless headline on an alleged vigilante prowling the streets of New York, watching over the working girls and the homeless. The article, written by a Kat Farrell, was far more measured than its subeditor-assigned headline. A bland quote by MacTaggert took up a few lines. Erik imagined her strained poker face, and felt a stab of unwilling sympathy. Charles Xavier was probably the least of her worries.

From a professor and mutant lobbyist to a living ghost lobbing enigmatic clues at the police — it was a far fall. Ororo could probably tell him more about the man, if he asked. He was curious and Charles was damnably arresting, but Erik's not sure the effort was worth it. Charles was an exile from the world Erik lived in, a momentary blip who could've been a history-maker but failed to leave anything lasting.

"He's not crazy," Angel said abruptly later, as they pulled away from the building.

Erik glanced at her. "I never said he was."

"I'm not an idiot, Lehnsherr. You were thinking it. And no, he didn't tell me that." Angel negotiated a street corner with perhaps a little more fierceness than warranted. "He's just— not well."

"I heard about him and the Psi Act."

She barked out a harsh laugh. "That's all anyone knows about him now. You should've known him back then. Arrogant son of a bitch, and the best damn teacher I ever had."


	2. Chapter 2

Erik woke up with the sun, blushing gold and pink across the sky, and Asshole yowling outside his window. Half-asleep and cursing under his breath, he flicked open the window latch and dragged it up with a gesture, sending a metal bowl flying from the kitchenette to land on the fire escape with a clatter. One of his neighbours, probably the would-be serial killer next door, yelled at him to stop feeding the goddamn cat; Erik stopped the infernal noise by yelling back and slamming his window shut.

He switched the radio on as he rolled out of bed and headed into the shower, a cheerful-sounding deejay speaking over the automated whirr of the coffee machine in his kitchenette. He made a mental note to reply to Ororo's e-mail inviting him out for brunch on Saturday. It amused her to use him as a living battering ram to clear a path through the throngs of shoppers at the Greenmarket, which was fair payment for his habit of calling her at odd hours when he was insomniac and angry.

Erik listened to the news on NPR as he shaved and dressed, separating the wheat from the chaff: El Salvador electing its first mutant mayor, speculation that the vigilante doing the rounds in New York was a mutant, and a 10-second sound bite from a deep-voiced woman warning of the effects of NHS cuts on mutants needing long-term care. Her accent reminded him of Charles Xavier.

His mood soured at the thought. The Volkov case was setting off every instinct he had that something was about to take a sharp left turn to the bad. At least the lab managed to lift a useable print off Volkov's mangled fingers and confirm his identity. He and Angel were due to question Sebastian Shaw today, keeping up the pretense that it was just another homicide. No, sir, nothing to see here. Just another dead mutant and a shady ex-senator and a partner in cahoots with a telepath.

A scratching sound at the window signalled the commencement of the daily battle between him and Asshole, post-breakfast. Erik glared at the cat over the rim of his mug and tried to remember if he'd oiled the window recently. He raised his hand, grabbing hold of Asshole's bowl with his power, then — quick as a flash — lifted the window just high enough to slide the bowl through and clapped it shut before Asshole could move so much as a paw.

She hissed her displeasure, brindled fur puffing out like a brush.

"Fuck off," he said. "You're not my pet. _My_ apartment. Not yours."

Asshole mewled at him, her claws skittering across glass panes. In the warm glow of deserved victory, Erik washed the dishes and left them to dry on a rack. The cat had turned her attention to sunning herself by the time he walked out the door, his infraction clearly forgiven and forgotten. Erik allowed himself a small, wry smile.

*****

Shaw Worldwide LLC's New York office was housed in a shining steel-and-glass edifice in Midtown Manhattan. A young woman, vibrating with a sleek, setter-like eagerness, led them through endless corridors and security scans to Shaw's office. Erik had assumed that she was Shaw's personal assistant. She firmly corrected him in faintly scandalised tones: she was interning under Shaw's _actual_ personal assistant, who turned out to be a man Erik recognised from Muñoz's dossier of photos. The good-looking one with a taste for Ozwald Boateng suits.

"I'm Janos Quested. Pleased to meet you, detectives," he said. "I'll buzz you through the door — Mr. Shaw is expecting you."

"I'll bet he is," Angel muttered under her breath.

Shaw was exactly how Erik remembered him from newspaper photographs and PBS broadcasts of campaign speeches: a bluff and well-groomed man of indeterminable middle age, his faded blue eyes reflecting only straight-up sincerity. His office breathed a certain mahogany-lined, luxurious masculinity, but was a shade too ostentatious to be entirely in good taste. Erik's mother probably would've described it delicately as "a few too many diamonds on a damn chicken egg." 

"Thank you for making time for us, Mr. Shaw," Angel said, entirely devoid of emotion, as she took a seat after the introductions.

"The pleasure is all mine, detective," Shaw said with a grin that showed all his teeth. "What can I do for you?"

Erik flipped open his notebook. He hated this part: breaking the news on someone's death. "We'd like to ask you some questions about one of your employees, Ilya Volkov. I'm afraid he was found dead yesterday under suspicious circumstances."

Shaw's eyebrows lifted. "That's shocking, simply shocking. I'm very sorry to hear of his death, he's been an asset to the company for years." He spread his hands. "I don't know how much I can assist you, detectives. Volkov resigned from my employ last week."

Angel and Erik exchanged a look. "Why'd he resign?" she asked.

"Ilya is— _was_ the strong, silent type. Not big on conversation," Shaw said. "He didn't say. It probably had something to do with a woman, that was my impression. Poor boy, he was a romantic under that devilish look."

"Tell us more about him," Erik said. "Did he have family here?"

Shaw rubbed his chin. "He was an orphan. Former military in the motherland, joined us seven years ago. One of my best recruits, as a matter of fact. Didn't have much of a private life — he was very focused on his work, that was our Ilya."

"But you were under the impression that he left your company for a woman," Erik pressed.

"I try to be friendly with my employees. Keeps them loyal. Ilya wasn't keen on making friends with anyone, including yours truly, but one hears things — never doubt the power of gossip. He's been keeping company with a pretty little redhead, name and provenance unknown."

"Do you know anyone who would want to hurt him? Has he been threatened recently?"

Shaw sighed. "Detective Lehnsherr, I run a security management company. We have contracts with the US government — they don't make us very popular where we operate. And given Ilya's past, you could come up with a list of thousands if you dig deep enough."

The intercom on Shaw's desk trilled discreetly.

"Ah, that's my cue to take my leave. Duty calls — I have a meeting in a few minutes. Is there anything else?"

"We'd like his current address on your files, if possible," Angel said. "Thank you again for your time."

"Of course. Anything you need." Shaw shook his head. "What a terrible business."

*****

"He's lying through his teeth," Angel said, as soon as they were safely ensconced in the car and on their way out of Shaw Worldwide's cavernous, multi-level underground parking lot. "I can fucking _smell_ it."

Erik grunted. "You want me to turn around and slap a pair of handcuffs on him, Salvadore? Maybe bend over for his lawyer to kick my ass while I'm at it? We have nothing we can hold him for."

Angel looked like she wanted to spit acid into his face. "Come on, Lehnsherr: do _you_ buy the line about Volkov having quit the company? How fucking convenient was that? The timing ain't right — Shaw must've gotten wind that the Feds are tailing him. Maybe Volkov wanted to turn informant."

"Even if Shaw was the crime lord the DA wants us to believe he is, it doesn't mean he killed Volkov."

"Why are you being so defensive about Shaw, anyway?" Angel's eyes caught his in the rearview mirror. Her mouth fell open. "Oh my god, you're one of _those_ mutants."

"What do you mean, one of _those_ mutants?"

"The ones who think we oughta be rooting for any mutant with any kind of power, even if they're dickbags like Shaw," she said. "Jesus. Shaw doesn't give a shit about people like us — he just uses us, same like the assholes who hire mutants and argue they don't need health and safety precautions."

"Don't you know how this'll play out in the press?" Erik growled. He thought about Magda, and her face as the judge handed down his ruling. "The headlines aren't going to read: 'Former Senator arrested on corruption charges.' No, they're going to say: 'First mutant Senator arrested.' The flatscans don't give a shit about us either — they'll use Shaw to crucify the rest of us. We could be saving kittens and puppies every damn day and all they care to remember is one mutant making one mistake."

"Maybe it escaped your notice, but Shaw is going around killing psionics. _Mutants like us_. That's more than a mistake. That's fucking murder."

"I'm not saying he's as pure as the goddamn snow. It still doesn't mean I'm wrong about the flatscans and what they're going to do to us when this gets out." Erik stared out into the traffic. "Mutants should deal with mutants. Not humans."

Angel threw up her hands. " _We're_ humans, Lehnsherr. We're born from humans. We give birth to humans. What the fuck, we're not different species. Like, oh, cats and spiders. Roses and sheep. Not mutant and non-mutant humans. Basic biology, Jesus. I don't see the Homo Superior bunch letting polydactyl people into the club, and they're as mutant as I am."

"Growing wings and spitting acid are qualitatively different from having an extra finger, Salvadore," Erik said drily.

She gave him a sidelong look. "I don't belong with people who look like you and Charles any more than I belong with the bigots who called me a mutie." Her jaw tensed. "It's not like mutants don't see colour either — and I don't mean the blue-skinned kind — or the fact that I have breasts and a vagina."

"People are assholes," Erik offered after a long pause, painfully aware of its cliched inadequacy. "Also, I'm fucking Jewish, so watch who you're grouping me with."

Angel rolled her eyes. But whatever reply she was about to snap out was interrupted by the crackle of the dispatch radio:

"... shooting in progress. All units respond..."

*****

Erik was predisposed to feeling less than sympathetic towards someone who owned a Fifth Avenue penthouse triplex, but it was hard to look at the children's drawings tacked up on the fridge, then at the glass and blood scattered across the living, and not feel a chill over how much worse it could've been. He gave Emma Frost grudging points for keeping a cool head under fire. When he and Angel arrived, her hands had been soaked crimson with Scott Summers's blood from pressing on a gunshot wound to keep him from bleeding out. Her request for a moment to wash her hands was nothing short of a masterclass in boardroom poise.

She declined to give a statement at the station. Clean, once again immaculately dressed in her trademark whites, Frost led them into a library. She didn't bother to call in her lawyer to stand guard over every word graciously given to New York's finest, not that it mattered to a telepath with the power to wipe memories at will. Angel, Erik saw, seemed perfectly at ease with Frost, making the requisite courtesies and small talk with far more warmth than she'd shown Shaw. Erik noted the lived-in feel of the library, the colouring books and Lemony Snicket novels piled up neatly beside script treatments and Royal Society journals. It was, clearly, the heart of the Frost home. Framed photographs showed Frost with two small children, a toddler girl and an infant.

"Your children," he said. "Where are they?"

"Out with the nanny and a friend, thank god," said Frost. Her gaze shifted to the photos, then back to Erik. "Well. I see that both of you are mutants, what an interesting coincidence. As to what happened, Scott and I were going over the day's schedule in the living room when the first shot came through the window. It must have missed me by inches. Scott pushed me behind the sofa. There were two more shots, then I saw him on the floor, bleeding. I dragged him in with me and called 911. I fear I didn't see anything."

She paused. "Since your next question is appallingly obvious to any telepath, I suppose I should tell you that yes, I can think someone who might want to hurt me. Not a specific 'someone', but—" Frost smiled tightly "—I'm funding the legal fees for a suit challenging the constitutionality of the Psi Act. I expect that presents me as a target."

"There've been other efforts to strike down the law before and they all failed," Erik said. Something prickled down his spine. "What makes this one different?"

Frost laughed. "The difference, darling, is that I'm throwing everything I have behind it."

Privately, Erik conceded the point. Frost inherited a media empire that made her one of the wealthiest women in the world at age 21. He read a _Time_ feature on her once, years ago, a puff piece that spent more time speculating on the unknown father of her daughter than the fact that merely fifteen years after she took over from her own father, she'd surpassed him in everything that mattered. Under her judicious hand, the Frost Group expanded to include broadcast networks in three countries and popular tabloids and magazines in virtually every major language. 

If she wanted to, Frost could make damn sure they all carried a pro-telepath line, to hell with advertisers and American public sentiment. Editorial independence wasn't worth nuts when the owner wouldn't lose any sleep over hiring more accommodating employees. But why now, after all this time? He didn't recall Frost being on the list of actively pro-mutant employers. Frost was an out-and-proud telepath, though, and—

Of course, Erik thought to himself. Psionic mutants. They've always been the only mutants who could make any real claim to having formed a cohesive community, despite the hackneyed newsspeak of "the mutant community" and exhortations addressing "us mutants". Telepaths and strong empaths, especially. Hadn't they started intra-marrying almost from the beginning, in the 60s? 

He took a punt in the dark, and asked, "Did you know an Astrid Bloom?"

If he hadn't been looking out for it, he probably would've missed it. Frost didn't so much as blink or uncross her long, elegant legs, but her breathing hitched, just the barest of intake. Erik clamped down on his thoughts, shuffled them away behind a smokescreen of nonsensical rhymes, the way he'd been trained to do. Her eyes narrowed.

"Virtually every telepath in this country knows each other, even if they've never met in person," she said. "Yes, I know the late Ms. Bloom. Her partner, as well. We met when they organised a little talk at Columbia. She was a Women's Studies major, I believe."

"And what was this talk about?"

"The usual thing psionic mutants do for those of us who are younger and... less sure of ourselves. Bring in role models. Tell them they're not alone. Teach them to take care of themselves." Emma leaned back on the sofa, studying Erik like a hawk deciding whether to tear its prey apart. "I think I've entertained this line of questioning long enough, detective. Unless it has any relevance to today's incidence, I decline to answer further questions."

"It's fine," Angel cut in, ignoring Erik's surprised glare. "Who would have access to information about your movements? Is the meeting between you and Mr Summers scheduled?"

"Not as such, no, but Scott and I have a standing working lunch here in mid-week. All my staff are aware of it — my PA holds my calls and the household staff have the afternoon off. Including the nanny, when my friend is up to the challenge of managing two children on his own."

"But not this week."

"My friend has been rather poorly." Frost raised a sculpted eyebrow. "I can assure you that if any of my staff are responsible for this in any way, I would have known. I _always_ know." 

Angel jotted down notes, paused, and looked up. Quietly, she asked, "Did you sense anything about the shooter?"

Frost held Angel's eyes for a heartbeat too long, before looking away. "No. If I were to speculate, darling, I'd say the shooter was a mutant with psionic immunity — or someone has actually invented an anti-telepath device that works." She stopped and tilted her head, the line of her mouth melting into a genuine smile. "Oh, do excuse me. My children are home."

The library door flew open, disgorging a girl of about six, with blonde hair falling in a curtain around her narrow face. Her cornflower-blue eyes were bright with tears as she ran towards Frost, flinging her arms around her mother. For the first time that afternoon, Frost looked uncertain, but she fitted her daughter against her body comfortably, and the kiss she bestowed on the girl's crown was gentle and heartfelt.

There was a discreet clatter of footsteps at the doorway. A woman in dark glasses strode in, looking anxious, followed by — Erik swore under his breath, reflexive, making Angel elbow him in the ribs — Charles Xavier, who was fast making his way up Erik's shit list. Of all the gin joints in the world, Erik thought, he had to walk into this one.

"Angel, hello! And Detective Lehnsherr, how nice to see you again."

Charles had made an attempt at a respectable presentation, at least. He was still scruffy, but in the dark tweed coat and a black scarf wound around his neck, he looked like any other academic too distracted by work to care about his appearance. Erik frowned at the toddler he carried in his arms. Frost's son, he guessed, a boy with dark hair and his sister's blue eyes. No, he had heterochromatic eyes — his left eye was green. 

Erik supposed Frost would know better, but someone like Charles shouldn't be around children. As he watched, though, Charles leaned down and kissed Frost on the cheek, the gesture practiced and familiar. So Charles was the friend on whom Frost foisted her children a day a week.

They stared at each other for a long moment, unblinking. Erik waited for someone to say something, anything, before he realised, chagrined, that Charles and Frost were communicating telepathically. Frost gave a small huff of laughter — she'd caught the thought.

"May I introduce my children, Sophie and David Frost," she said smoothly. "Charles you already know. And this is the children's nanny, Alison Double. If you'll excuse me, I need to talk to Sophie and David privately for a few minutes."

"We're done here for the moment," Angel said. "We'll be in touch if we have more questions. Thank you for your time."

"I'll walk them out, Em," Charles said, bussing David on the forehead and handing him over carefully to Frost. He bent down to give Sophie a tight hug, then ushered Erik and Angel out of the room with a solicitous smile that immediately made Erik bristle.

Angel hung back to ask for Alison Double's contact details, cruelly leaving Erik alone to stew in awkward silence with Charles in the elevator, counting down the floor numbers. Charles stood with his hands behind his back, rocking on his heels, a half-step in front of Erik and a decorous arm's length away. Erik watched him covertly. He'd noticed Charles's freckles before, but not the small scars peppering his blunt fingers.

"Emma said you asked her about Astrid," Charles said, managing to sound both diffident and curious.

"I did." Erik briefly wished for the ability to peel open Charles's head. Or, failing that, a warrant and a room at the station. "You knew her too."

"Of course. It's tragic, what happened to her." Charles turned his head slightly, pinning Erik in place with a solemn stare. "I always feel it, when one of us dies. And her death wasn't natural — far from it. Neither were the deaths of others like her."

Erik's hands twitched. He jammed them into his coat pockets. "And what are you going to do about it, Dr. Xavier?"

"As you have said to me, any statement I give is worthless in court, for as long as the Psi Act stands." The elevator doors opened with a soft _ping_. "Until the law is struck down, I will simply continue to do what I've always done."

He didn't like the sound of that, though Charles's tone was lightly matter-of-fact, not threatening. "Which is?"

"Watch after my friends, and have faith that they can do the rest. They haven't disappointed me yet. I fear the reverse is untrue, however." Charles nodded at the concierge, who smiled at him in recognition. "Don't worry, detective. I have no intention of turning vigilante. I tried to save the world once — it didn't take."

Questions crowded Erik's head, but he held them cupped in silence for too long, and then Charles was gone.


	3. Chapter 3

Erik had saved the e-mail Ororo sent him upon the ruin of his former life: a five-page dissertation on why he fucked up, gently-worded but ruthlessly honest, and how he should start over. _Come and live where I am_ , she'd written, with a bulleted list detailing the merits of New York, including the subway system. She attached pictures. It was a well-played tactic deployed to marvelous effect, because Erik hated commuting by car. He preferred the teeth-grinding resonance of a train carriage around him, the metallic whine of the tracks and their utilitarian, unassuming strength.

Ororo first met Yukio when she and Erik had gone to an exhibition at MoMA on impulse years ago, on one of his rare visits to the city before he moved there for good. They'd been entranced by one of the installations: wrought iron bars hammered into simulacra of train tracks, suspended and twisted around a searchlight projected from ceiling to floor, like a phoenix and a dragon circling a moon. It was titled, simply, _Lovers_.

"'A relationship is analogous to two train tracks running parallel to each other, for as long as purpose and terrain allow, but never truly meeting'," Ororo read from the artist statement. She wrapped her arms around his waist and squeezed, affectionate and teasing. "Erik, I think you have found your soulmate."

It was Ororo, however, who found hers that afternoon — much to Erik's everlasting horror. Yukio always claimed it was love at first sight, that she'd gone over to say hello because having Ororo in her life was a foregone conclusion, as natural as breathing. Erik always maintained it was bullshit, that it had more to do with Ororo looking like a supermodel slumming it with the plebes and Yukio being a serial debaucher of bright young things.

Yukio had said, a few months after she and Ororo started dating, "There's no reason why they need to be mutually exclusive, Erik. People are allowed to be complex. Even you."

The memory stayed with him over the next few weeks after he met Charles Xavier for the second time, through two murders, an attempted robbery and assault, and a shootout that ended with two dead bystanders. The surviving witness was a mutant, a teenager by the name of Suzanne Chan, daughter of the dead. A time manipulator, which saved her life; she had instinctively slowed down the bullets and got away without a scratch. Erik remembered her ashen face, the brown eyes that stared up at him in shock and grief. He would have to check on her later, and hope to fuck that she didn't have to be sent into foster care.

The Volkov case was an albatross around his neck and Angel's, her patience shortening with the daylight hours as the city marched briskly through fall. Erik, irritated, alternated between wanting to provoke her into a fight and googling for therapist recommendations. He didn't do either, because he did try to be a good partner. And Angel herself seemed to catch on whenever she wasn't one hundred percent on the ball, without him having to say anything about it. She was a good cop, when her secrets weren't pulling her down.

Not that he had a leg to stand on when it came to ghosts from the past, but, Erik thought, why let it stop him from judging?

"Look alive, Lehnsherr," Karima Shapander said briskly as she walked past his desk, Cassidy trotting after her like a red-haired terrier, fresh from the Box. "The lieutenant's been eyeballing you for at least fifteen minutes. Try to look like you're not sulking because your partner ate lunch with the cool kids."

Erik snorted and opened the Volkov casefile again, flicking through the photographs. Volkov lived an unremarkable life in a pricey waterfront apartment on Brighton Beach when he wasn't toting an assault rifle for a hefty paycheck. Neighbours described him as quiet and helpful, with few visitors. Some of them recognised Shaw and his PA from the photographs Angel showed them. Others described the occasional one-off men and women — the concierge swore up and down that they were pros. No girlfriends, at least no one who showed up more than once. If his purported lover existed, Volkov didn't see fit to bring her to his place.

Volkov apparently helped his elderly neighbour walk his dog whenever Volkov was around, which was rarely. Remarkable, Erik thought. Almost everyone who knew him suspected that Volkov was involved in something not quite legal, but in the words of the dog owner, "He liked animals, so he must be all right." But he'd been the one who had the most to say about Volkov, rambling on about how Volkov once said he had no contact with anyone he knew from Russia because he liked clean breaks. That Volkov had burned his army uniform and commendations.

Something nagged at the back of his head. What was it that Charles had said, when they first met? Buttons, that was it. Erik stared at the photographs of Volkov's clothes. A Chalcidian helmet, engraved on the buttons. The logo of Shaw Worldwide was a stylised S on a shield, evading copyright infringement claims from DC Comics by a hair, but — Erik opened his browser — it didn't mean that was always the case.

Thank fuck for Wikipedia, he thought, scrolling down to an illustration on the page. Shaw Worldwide was once named Caspartina Security Services, around the time Volkov joined up, and its logo was the exact same helmet on Volkov's buttons. If Volkov was the kind of man who left smoking ruins of his bridges behind him, why would he be going around in clothes stamped with the mark of his former employer?

*****

Erik believed in honing one's instincts through experience, but trusted logic and a meticulous compilation of evidence over some woo-woo "sixth sense" unsupported by anything that could go in front of a jury. Whether they were too stupid to come to the right decision was moot — the point was _he_ knew when he was being sloppy. Going off half-cocked on a solitary hunt based on a bunch of half-thought guesses made him want to shoot himself. Better to have to prowl outside a lecture hall in Columbia University feeling embarrassed and self-conscious, though, than to potentially let slip another piece of the puzzle.

Leida Ramos Echemendía, the late Astrid Bloom's girlfriend, was a Physics PhD student. She was also an empath. Erik knew this because upon the production of his badge and rehearsed explanation, she informed him coldly that any defense lawyer would tear her testimony to shreds, so he should look elsewhere for hard evidence.

"Your testimony is only inadmissible if the information you have was obtained psionically," he said, too annoyed to rein in the snippy edge to his words.

She pointed a finger at him. "I didn't know they changed the rest of the rules on hearsay too."

"Look, miss," Erik said, "throw me a goddamn bone here. I'm a mutant like you — I'm trying to help."

"Is everything all right?" A tall, blue-furred man in a suit loomed indecisively over them, one large hand hovering at Leida's elbow. Large, soulful golden eyes peered suspiciously at Erik through thick-framed glasses. "Leida?"

"It's fine, Dr. McCoy. This cop's asking me about— about Astrid."

McCoy made a low, rumbling sound, glowering at Erik. "It's been a year, _must_ you—"

"I'm interviewing _her_ , doctor," Erik said. "You want to talk to me? Take a number."

"Look, let me finish up here, okay?" Leida said to McCoy. "It won't take long." She attempted a smile, gave that up, and went with a reassuring pat to his arm. "Don't call the ACLU."

McCoy didn't look assured. "Do you have his name and badge number?"

"It's Detective Erik Lehnsherr," Erik bit out. McCoy finally slunk away, throwing one last doubtful look over his shoulder as he disappeared into an office.

"He's protective of you," Erik said to Leida.

"He's my thesis supervisor. I—" she paused "—wasn't well for a long time, after Astrid died."

"She complained of harassment before her death, didn't she?"

"Yes." Leida broke eye contact and bit her lip. "Astrid showed me their faces. Telepathically, I mean. In case they went after me, too. She said she couldn't read the guy in the helmet at all."

Erik flipped open his notebook, floating his pen into his hand. "Nothing at all?"

"No, but it's not _that_ strange. Astrid wasn't a very powerful telepath, and some people have better psionic defences than others."

"Did she tell you what they wanted with her?"

Leida shook her head. "Astrid was scared. You don't know her, but she was the bravest person I ever met — forever getting involved in this campaign and that action. Whoever they were, they weren't up to any good."

"Could you recognise them if you see them again?"

"Not the guy in the helmet, but the red guy, yeah. Wasn't the last time I saw him." She ran a hand through her mess of black curls, agitated. "I don't know why you people are asking me about all this again."

"Excuse me?"

"A lady detective came to see me a couple of weeks ago. She said that Astrid's name came up in an investigation, and asked if anything happened to me recently."

Erik's heart thumped. "Was it a Detective Salvadore? I'm new here — we haven't cross-checked our investigation files yet," he lied.

"Yes! Yes, that was her name." Leida's hands twitched, and she tucked them around each other. "The red guy showed up at my door about two weeks before Detective Salvadore came calling. He said—" She shook her head. "He wasn't making any sense. He said he was sorry and that he was going to repay me. I thought he was drunk. Or crazy."

" _Was_ he drunk?" Erik asked carefully.

"I didn't smell alcohol on him. And I sensed that he was telling the truth, or what he thought was the truth. He didn't stick around, though. Left after maybe five minutes, so I didn't bother calling in the cops." She sighed, then said quietly, "I don't understand anything."

You and me both, Erik thought. "Thank you for your cooperation. I'll be in touch."

After all the things that had happened to him over the course of a month, he shouldn't have been surprised to find Angel waiting for him at the car. She looked at him with that pinched, dead-eyed stare he was beginning to recognise as Angel's very own unique mixture of disappointed hope — despite knowing better — and a rage that clawed up deep from the recesses of her personal history, to which he was never admitted entry.

She held out a hand, palm up. "The keys, please."

Erik tossed them over and got into the passenger seat without a murmur. He waited until they were on the road before saying, "You should've fucking trusted me, Salvadore."

"Sure, Mister All-Mutants-Must-Unite." She tossed off a scorching glare. "Man, after our talk about Shaw, and with the way you were all jittery at telepaths, can you blame me for being a little cautious?"

"I don't know what's worse: that, or you thinking that I'm a fucking idiot — didn't you think I was going to work it out?"

"I was hoping for a little more time," Angel said. Her voice was drained of anger, leaving only weariness. "Anyway, what was the tipping point?"

"Volkov's buttons," he said, sneaking a look at her. "They had an old logo of Shaw's company. Not exactly casualwear for someone who handed in his resignation."

"I think Volkov had an attack of conscience." Angel drummed her fingers against the steering wheel. "Maybe he wanted to turn himself in long before, but stayed on to gather evidence. I think going to see Leida was what got him killed."

Erik snorted. "Stupid of him."

"Sometimes we just gotta do what feels right, Lehnsherr," she said. Her shoulders made a taut, unhappy line. "Whoever it was who convinced Volkov to betray Shaw — maybe they pushed too hard."

"Speculation. All we have is speculation," he said. "Any judge will laugh us out of court."

"For now," Angel said grimly. "One day we'll put that son of a bitch away for good."

*****

Erik started making a habit out of scanning the news for any mention of a legal challenge to the Psi Act, ignoring the increasingly hysterical headlines on "The Shadow", as the newspapers dubbed New York's very own mysterious superhero-slash-vigilante. Thus far there was little to go on except for a casual aside on a committee looking at mutant-related laws, buried in a column on an argument that erupted over an inexplicably minor point of House procedures. He noted the newspaper: it was owned by the Frost Group.

Perhaps Frost had changed her mind, after the shooting. Scott Summers was back at her side in paparazzi photos of parties glittering with socialites, fully healed and as dashingly square-jawed as ever. Occasionally they were photographed together with Armando Muñoz and Alex Summers, the latter always transparently bored and hating every minute of his spousal obligation. Sometimes, Erik thought, the age and maturity gap between the two was probably better described as a chasm.

He dug up more information on Charles Xavier, following his trail from his childhood in Westchester to Harvard, then to Oxford, and from there, Columbia. Charles, it seemed, was held in high esteem by his colleagues. Erik came across a photograph of Charles with Dr. McCoy, looking startlingly young, captioned as "Dr. Xavier and a colleague in Columbia University." Up until his very public stand against the Psi Act, Charles rarely made even the society pages. Academic journals and popular science magazines were a more familiar stomping ground. 

Early photographs often showed him with a beautiful blonde woman: his sister, Raven Xavier, now chairperson of the Xavier Foundation. Very likely a human — there was no mention of any mutation — but clearly one much influenced by her brother. The Xaviers had a reputation for being intensely loyal to each other and well-connected, the last of a long line of eccentric philanthropists and public intellectuals. 

Erik had a folder in his laptop and a box under his desk with news clippings on the the Psi Act, everything from Charles's campaign against it to letters written by obvious anti-mutant nutcases. There were a few news reports of him leaving Columbia in the aftermath, citing unspecified "professional infraction", the university apparently opting for discretion. Ororo forwarded him HRW's report on psionic mutants and the probable impact of what was then the Psi Bill; he fell asleep, mid-read, to dreams of its numerous and lengthy footnotes crawling up his legs. Fucking NGOs and their fucking reports.

He was still looking out for news on the Psi Act when, completely by accident, he came across a months-old review of a teen drama. The reviewer clearly thought himself too sophisticated to enjoy the glossy offerings of something called _Losers Like Us_ , but made much out of its apparently "sensitive and sympathetic" treatment of a telepathic character. Erik looked up the network where the show was broadcast. It was another Frost Group-owned media enterprise.

For days he worked like a man obsessed, filling in the shape of an idea forming in his head. He now knew more than he ever wanted about a decade's worth of Oscar and Emmy winners, and the _New York Times_ bestseller lists. Openly pro-psionic pieces in Frost-owned newspapers and magazines began appearing about seven years back, just before Frost had her daughter. And they weren't confined to USA-centric publications. He supposed it wasn't a coincidence that the Xavier Foundation was well-known as a funder of mutant rights organisations — and made it a funding condition that they had to work with telepaths and empaths.

All roads led to Charles Xavier, eventually.

He found Charles again in Union Square early in the evening, holding court with a gaggle of tourists. Erik hung back for a time, watching him from the sidelines, though he could tell from the tilt of Charles's smile that he was perfectly aware of Erik's presence.

"This is a game of two queens, equal in temperament and beauty," Charles was saying, pulling a card from a deck in his hands with a flourish. "The Queen of Hearts, who is my sister, first in my thoughts."

He offered it to a teenaged girl, face down. "Hold on tightly to that, my dear — not too tightly, because the Queen of Hearts hates to be caged. Oh dear, your father looks rather skeptical, doesn't he? You can give him a peek, so he can make sure you really do have the Queen of Hearts."

Laughter rippled through his audience as Charles upturned a second card, held on top of the deck. "The second queen is the Queen of Diamonds, a dear friend of mine and the best mother I know. Remember, you have hearts and I have diamonds, though neither should be more important than the other."

"This game doesn't have, like, a _moral_ to it or anything, right?" the teenager asked suspiciously.

Charles grinned and placed the second card on top of the first, face down. "That would be giving the end away. What's going to happen is that the queens are trading places for the night, that's how the game is played." He neatly plucked the Queen of Hearts from the girl's fingers, flipping it over and holding it with his fingertips at the back of the Queen of Diamonds. "Now you have diamonds and I have hearts — which one would you prefer?"

The girl squinted at Charles, uncertain. "Diamonds, thanks."

"Good choice, she's a lovely lady. Unfortunately, it's time for her to come back home. I'm going to try and do the switch again a little quicker, but the Queen of Diamonds doesn't really want to leave, so she's asking you to hold on tight, tighter than you did with the Queen of Hearts, so I can't take her away. Can you do that?"

She nodded. Charles flipped the card in his fingers again so it's facing down, tapping it against the one in the girl's hand. "Are you ready? Remember, the Queen of Diamonds doesn't want to leave. One, two, three — switch!"

In one smooth, quick movement, he drew the card in his fingers away from the girl and into the deck he was holding, seemingly leaving the one in the girl's hand untouched.

"Now," he said, offering the card in his hand to the girl, "would you believe that _both_ queens decided to go, and leave their aces behind with the keys to the kingdom? Very naughty of the queens, to change the game on us."

The girl upturned both cards, to gasps of delight: an Ace of Hearts and an Ace of Diamonds stared up at her. "But, where'd the queens go?"

Charles laughed and reached into his trouser pocket, pulling out two cards. "Right here, telling me what a terrible fashion sense I have," he said, and sure enough, they were the Queen of Hearts and the Queen of Diamonds.

Once the applause and the tourists drifted away, Erik strolled over, trying to keep his thoughts blank and pleasant. Charles smiled at him as he approached, shuffling his deck of cards.

"I hope you haven't come to arrest me for practicing sleight of hand, detective," he said.

Erik's lips quirked. "I think I can put away the handcuffs for the night."

Charles laughed, tucking the cards into his coat pocket and flashing Erik a look from under his lashes. "Under certain circumstances, Detective Lehnsherr, that is most regrettable."

He was going to let that one pass, Erik thought. "I need to ask you a question, Dr. Xavier." At the inquisitive tilt of Charles's eyebrow, he continued, "About this long game you're apparently playing. You have my permission to read my mind on this — and _only_ this."

"I'm quite sure this part should be preceded by flowers and dinner. And please call me Charles, you already do that in your head," Charles murmured, but the focus of his intense eyes was all on Erik now, his fingertips pressed to his temple. A visual tell for _Erik's_ comfort, he realised, not out of any necessity on Charles's part.

It felt like eons, time moving in a glacial march, but Charles took only a handful of minutes. Something in his posture changed as he dropped his fingers, shoulders loose and his weight shifting to the balls of his feet like a boxer, and for a moment Erik thought he was looking at a different man: a man who set off warnings like a firecracker. He blinked, and once again Charles was the sad-eyed magician Erik knew, wrapped in a shabby, once-expensive coat.

"I'm really not sure where to begin," Charles said. "Except to say that you have some of the pieces in the wrong place, though it's entirely unsurprising given your limitations."

"You let a telepath read your mind once, and he thinks tact is optional." Erik sighed. "Come on, then. You're getting your goddamn dinner."

He was half-expecting Charles to kick up a fuss over dinner being a sandwich and the cheapest drink on the menu, but Charles thanked him sincerely and bit into a cold BLT with every sign of relish. Erik picked at his own sandwich, grimacing at the spongy bread.

"I was a vegetarian in uni, in the days before everyone and their vegan dog discovered quinoa," Charles said, wiping his mouth delicately. "I learned not to care overmuch about paltry food — I was a terrible cook, as my sister can testify. We managed."

Erik opened his mouth to interject, but Charles cut him off with a sharp gesture of his hand. "You can't help but think like a foghorn, and I can't turn my telepathy on and off like a tap. I'm tired of this dance, detective: either stay or go, but please do me the courtesy of _not_ treating me like a bloody monster."

"Fine." Erik balled up his sandwich wrapper, tossing it into a bin. "Fine, so what can you tell me about this... conspiracy you have going?"

Charles tutted at him. "Calling it a conspiracy was your first mistake. It's more of a quiet revolution, at best."

"And at worst?"

"Doing what we need to do to survive." Charles looked down at his scarred fingers, stretching them out over his knees. "Even before the murders, we were dying. It's been more than a decade since the Psi Act came into being. Those of us who were young then are now parents, asking whether we did the right thing to bring children into a world that will always make them feel unwanted. Those of us who were children then are now young adults, with naught to look forward to except life in a Panopticon. Enough is enough."

He stopped, then continued quietly, "Here's another thing you're terribly wrong about: it's not me. I'm a teacher and a broken-down idealist. People like Emma and Raven, they're the ones fighting the good fight still. I just help where I can."

Erik let his eyes linger on Charles's face, the imperious arch of his brow and slightly over-large nose, the afterthought of a pointed chin under his shapely mouth. There were histories written into the lines at the corner of his eyes and the scars on his hands and the way he sat folded into himself, all in a language Erik couldn't read. 

"What happened to you, Charles Xavier?"

"Let's not talk about that," Charles said, and the hard finality of his tone brooked no cajoling. "Let's talk about the other question you had."

"The murders."

"Yes. Well, let's start with a story — a probability only, mind you. Imagine that you were secretly sponsoring a bill for your own purposes," Charles said, very carefully. "Perhaps because the people targeted by the bill were a danger to your interests. Or, conversely, because such a law would make them easier pickings. And, possibly, also because certain people in this group possessed incriminating knowledge about you and what you've been doing to them.

"Now imagine that you've grown wealthy and powerful in the time since the law was passed. But the people you targeted, no, _they_ refused to be put in their place and stay there. And in the meantime, you've been using them for less than ethical ends. Suddenly, here comes a group of them to challenge the law you helped bring about. It looks like they might actually win, putting into risk everything you have. A sharp warning may seem perfectly justifiable."

"And you accuse me of being a conspiracy theorist," Erik said mildly.

"True. Nevertheless, in a world where you have a partner who spits acid and I can read minds, is it really that far-fetched?" Charles steepled his fingers, tapping them against his chin. "Emma approached all the psionic mutants in our network for the suit, so it took us some time to realise there was a pattern in the killings. We cast such a wide net, at first we thought it was only a terrible coincidence that some of the people we approached died one after the other."

Erik frowned. Something in the way Charles phrased it triggered a memory in the back of his head, just out of his conscious grasp.

"I'm sure even you would be willing to concede that with Astrid's death, it can't possibly be a coincidence. There's—" Charles halted, one hand placed over his mouth as if to stop himself from throwing up. His face blanched. "Erik, there's been another murder."

*****

"We have to stop meeting like this," Erik said to Angel as he ducked under the police tape. She scowled at him from where she was hovering over the body, wings buzzing furiously.

Cassidy popped up at Erik's side, looking obscenely fresh and blow-dried, holding out a leather wallet. "Jason Wyngarde. Forty-four years old, local. Worked for a bank."

Erik stared down at the man's unremarkable face, his carefully maintained hair and expensive suit soaking up stagnant water in an alley. A faint expression of horror and surprise remained on his face, his arms flung up in futile self-protection. Half his chest had disintegrated into ashes and charred bones, as if someone had tried to burn his heart out of him.

Erik's former partner always joked about Erik having eyes at the back of his head, but it was his mutant power that let him know when a person was out of place, if someone was sneaking up on him with a gun. He straightened from a crouch, looking around him, trying to place that strange concentration of metals—

_There._

It was that intern from Shaw Worldwide, the one who'd led him and Angel to Quested. She stared back at him with wide amber eyes, frozen in place for a precious second, then took a step back and bolted down a side-street.

"You! Stop!" Erik shouted, heart and feet hammering away as he ran past half-shuttered doors and neon windows, chasing after the intern. Too late, though: she was gone, leaving only a memory of the familiar resonance of steel — a handgun, tucked into her side.


	4. Chapter 4

Jason Wyngarde found the love of his life early and lost her just as soon to acute leukemia, leaving him to raise three daughters — all mutants — with the help of the local psionic network. Martinique, the eldest, was twenty-two. Her sisters, Regan and Megan, were nineteen and sixteen respectively. Megan was born with secondary physical mutations along with her psionic ability: she had pink hair and iridescent dragonfly wings. None of the Wyngardes could tell Erik anything about their father that might have got him killed.

They invited Erik and Angel to the memorial service, held in the Wyngardes' brownstone home after a private cremation. It was non-denominational, Martinique assured him, nothing overtly religious. Erik wasn't quite sure what to expect — he had never been to the funeral of a psionic mutant, let alone one attended by luminaries of the community from across the county.

"Really, Erik, what were you expecting?" Charles murmured at his elbow, looking handsome and sharply-defined in a black suit. "That we would all be speaking telepathically? Perhaps sing hymns in our heads?"

Erik glowered at him, because that was exactly the half-shameful vision he'd been cultivating at the back of his mind. Thus far the service was solidly, inoffensively middle-class in taste and execution: banal conversation spoken in hushed tones over canapes and non-alcoholic sparkling cider. Regan read, _time does not bring relief_ , in a voice that spoke of tears and insomniac nights since the death of her father. Leida was there too, dabbing at her eyes with a crumpled tissue, as was Alison Double.

"There you are, Charles." A stunningly beautiful woman strode up to them, glitzy smartphone clutched in the hand that wasn't carrying a glass half-full with red wine. Erik recognised her as Raven Xavier, Charles's sister. He eyed the yellow gold trim of her phone, then her shoes. Ms. Xavier wore her improbably high heels like a declaration of war, which was par for course for someone who pacified — with extreme prejudice — a board of directors on the verge of revolt after Charles transferred everything he owned to her. _Harvard Business Review_ had been surprisingly informative.

Charles kissed her on the cheek. "Erik, meet my sister, Raven. Darling, this is Detective Erik Lehnsherr."

"Great to finally meet you," she said, looking at him up and down boldly. The expression on her face said everything most people needed a few minutes and a nail-studded baseball bat to say: _I have your measure, Erik Lehnsherr. You're not fit to kiss my brother's shoes, and if you hurt him I will end you. I know where you live. You will not survive this._

He gave her his most irritating smile. She responded with an unimpressed arch of her eyebrow. To Charles, she said, "The press conference is going to start in a few minutes. Come on, I know you don't want to be photographed, so let's find you a good place to stand."

"Press conference?" Erik asked. The Xavier siblings ignored him. He caught Angel's eye across the room — she shrugged at him and nodded towards the front door, where Emma Frost exited the house in a sweep of black silk and wool, to a storm of waiting journalists. The Wyngarde sisters bracketed her like an honour guard, Martinique holding Megan's hand. Telepaths and empaths streamed out after them, standing behind the four on the pavement.

Erik pushed past them, hurriedly getting out of the way of the cameras and digital recorders. He lost Angel somewhere in the crowd, but Charles was standing alone just outside the assembled circle, looking on with a small, pleased smile. Erik nudged up against him, and they stood shoulder-to-shoulder.

Martinique spoke first. In a clear, even voice, she talked about what a loving father Jason Wyngarde was to her and her sisters. He hadn't been a very powerful psionic mutant, she said, but the paranoia of the Psi Act made his life difficult: he wasn't allowed to work clientside, lest he was accused of telepathically influencing the clients. Despite the fact that he'd only really been able to project telepathic illusions, and was incredibly afraid of even accidentally triggering it.

Frost took over smoothly. "We don't know if Jason tried to save his life with his psionic ability, but even if he did he certainly would have thought twice about it. Our community has documented cases where psionic mutants used their abilities in self-defence, in cases where they were clearly victims, only to be subjected to interrogation and detention under the Psi Act. This is an intolerable violation of our rights and civil liberties. For over a decade, we suffered in silence. No more."

Erik muttered, under his breath, "I thought she was only— _she's_ taking the lead on this?"

"Things have changed," Charles said. His eyes were bright with tears and happiness, watching as the journalists erupted into a storm of questions upon the end of Frost's statement. "The time for sitting back in the little webs we spun is over."

"Then shouldn't you be up there with them?"

Charles took his hand and squeezed tenderly. "Not today, my friend."

Erik opened his mouth to say something cutting about the liberties Charles was taking with his person, but his attention was abruptly snagged by Angel and Raven Xavier, talking together at the far end of the press conference. He would've dismissed it as a casual conversation, but they were standing too close together for strangers. Something in the relaxed set of Angel's shoulders and the warm glow of Raven's smile spoke of intimacy, perhaps a shared joke between friends.

"Erik," Charles said. He hadn't let go of Erik's hand. "You should trust her. Everyone has secrets."

"Not to you." Erik was sorry as soon as he said it, though, for banishing Charles's smile. "Look, I don't mean it that way."

"Yes, you do."

Erik wanted a stiff drink and everything to start making sense, and for his head to stop hurting, over-full with questions and half-glimpsed revelations. In the end, though, he said, "I'll drive you home."

*****

Charles's apartment was filled with books, straggly potted plants, and antique furniture made for grander, chandelier-lit rooms. They looked like spares, dragged in from wherever Great-Aunt Somebody decided her mansion was due for a spring-cleaning. A walnut-framed portrait mirror was just visible through the open door of Charles's bedroom. Erik's mother owned one similar to this, a family heirloom that somehow survived the flight from Germany to the US. He had left it covered with cloth after she died, locking it and the shrouded photographs behind him when he walked out his mother's home for the last time.

"Make yourself at home," Charles said, apparently deaf to Erik's protestations that he was still on the clock. "I'll make us some tea."

Despite the books and the air of genteel ruin, the apartment felt impersonal, steeped in loneliness. Three photographs on the coffee table made all the difference: one of Charles and Raven as teenagers, one of Charles and Frost's children, and the last was one of Charles in front of a whiteboard scrawled over with physics equations, captured mid-gesture. To the side was a young Armando Muñoz, standing with his arms folded and looking over at Charles with a fond, I-am-humouring-you smile.

Erik stared at the photographs for a while, listening to the whistle of a boiling kettle in the kitchen and the clink of metal spoons against porcelain. He glanced at the faces of the Frost children again and Charles's beaming smile, his arms huge and protective around their small shoulders. His head felt light, dizzy with realisations. 

Charles pressed a mug of tea into his hands. Erik didn't have to taste it to know that Charles made it the way he liked to have his tea: black, with a bare sprinkling of sugar.

"Did you father Frost's children?" he asked, feeling his heart rabbiting away in his chest. His hands trembled, and he placed his mug on the table.

"I'm their father, yes." Charles met his eyes, cool and implacable. "As for the exact mechanics of their conception, that's none of your business."

Erik wanted to ask him about Angel, about Muñoz, if there was any possibility at all for the past not to rise up and drown all of them, and to explain the regrets and anger piling up between the cracks of his partner's secrets. Most of all, he wanted to know about Charles, what made him into this, if that was the key to the cipher.

"Charles," he said, "what happened to you?"

For a moment, Erik thought Charles would refuse to answer. Charles didn't say a word, but set aside his tea and shucked off his suit jacket. He undid his cuff links, tossing them onto the table, then unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it off.

Charles's pale skin was marked with scars, crawling across his torso. They were clearly deliberate, made with a sharp blade, sketching out geometric patterns and unintelligible words. Charles turned, presenting his back and the ugly, knotted patchwork of diagonal scars there. Helpless, Erik reached out to touch one, tracing its path across Charles's back with his fingertips.

"Inhibitor drugs suppress my telepathy only to a certain degree, not completely — I am, after all, rather powerful. The people who tortured me knew this. They put me on a high enough dosage that I couldn't influence them, but I could still read their thoughts. I knew what they wanted, and what they would do to me before they did it."

" _Who_ would—"

Charles spun around to face him. "I can't tell you. Not now. One day, perhaps. I can't stop you from looking, but are you certain you want to hear the answer?"

Erik laughed, wild and desperate. "Too fucking late for that, Xavier. I'll find out, whether I want to or not."

"You always have a choice, Erik."

"I have it on very good authority," he said, thinking of Ororo's voice on the phone at the end of his former life, "that denial isn't a _choice_. It's an affliction."

Charles leaned up and kissed him, his mouth warm and sweet, addictive. This was a terrible idea, Erik thought, but kissed back with fervour, pulling the warm line of Charles's body closer to him. They swayed together for long, slow minutes in the late afternoon sun, sinking into the taste of each other. Charles pulled back, eventually, and took Erik by the hand, leading him to Charles's bed.

Erik sat back on his knees and looked at Charles's lean, broad-shouldered body, stretched out on the stark white sheets below him, and wondered if any of Charles's lovers had felt like this: suspended between horror and arousal, terrified that Charles would be hurt again and he was the cause of it. Charles coaxed him down, already hard and yearning, and this close together he saw only the reflected light in Charles's eyes, universes in miniature.

 _May I?_ Charles murmured in his head, the softest of whispers, waiting at the boundaries for Erik's answer.

Erik squeezed his eyes shut, trying to think beyond the sudden, screaming loop of paranoia and fear. He swallowed around the dryness in his mouth.

_Yes._

*****

Charles never had nightmares, but he rarely slept for more than four or five hours at a time. When he spent the night at Erik's place on weekends, Erik usually woke up to the sight of Charles sitting by the window next to his bed, the damned cat purring as he petted her. Naked, which Erik appreciated; but with the morning newspaper pulled apart into sections at his feet, which Erik was less than sanguine about. 

It was disconcerting, even after weeks of Charles doing so, to be presented with a neat stack of exactly the sections he cared to read. Charles never asked, was never there for the complains Ororo had heard hundreds of times about Erik hating to have to wade through the muck for what he wanted out of a newspaper. At some point, Erik thought, they had to have a conversation on limits. If they were in this long enough, whatever "this" is. If he wanted to be in this long enough.

He wasn't ready to call it a relationship. 

Erik kept a folder of news and opinion articles on the legal challenge against the Psi Act. Frost was pictured in some of them, looking photogenic and untouchably beautiful. More often, though, she — and the people coordinating the campaign — made sure that the faces front and centre in the media were of your average, everyday psionic mutants. An empath father. A telepathic musician whose mutant ability added an extra dimension to her original compositions and performance. The Wyngarde sisters and their grief on display, a tragedy that became an impetus.

"Was any of it real?" Erik asked Charles, once. "Everything they said about Jason Wyngarde being the perfect father. Was it true? Or was it some kind of slick stage-management, Advocacy 101?"

Charles gave him a patient look, carefully devoid of condescension. "They can both be true. Why does the truth of one thing presuppose the exclusion of the other?"

Sometimes Erik thought this was what Charles was to him: a collection of contradictory truths, made up from pieces of the people who loved him. He was sure, now, that Angel loved Charles as she would a mentor, and she held Shaw responsible for what happened to him. But it wasn't her love that drove her into taking arms against Shaw — it was Charles's, faithful and unstinting, turning towards her as if she were the sun. No one could be loved that way and not want to be worthy of it, Erik thought. It was the most frightening thing he'd ever seen.

*****

He didn't stop looking, of course. But now Erik had the clues he needed to chase down paths he would otherwise never have considered, pick up on connections between random strings of information he would otherwise miss. He looked up Muñoz's biography: Muñoz was a law student in Columbia when Charles taught there, and their paths almost certainly crossed in one of the seminars where Charles was a guest instructor. 

If Muñoz was in on it with Angel, then Summers must be involved too. Charles was the bridge between Angel and Muñoz, through the volunteer tutor program Charles had been part of. But Angel was probably the key to Summers' involvement, given that Summers coming into contact with either Muñoz or Charles independently was damn near impossible. Chasing down the connection between Summers and Angel necessitated a more roundabout route, but Erik made a breakthrough when he discovered — entirely by accident, through one Oliver Black — that they grew up in the same neighbourhood. It was likely that Angel introduced Charles to Summers, sometime after Summers's last stint in juvie.

Shaw was the sticking point, though. Even given the time Charles spent in D.C. lobbying against the Psi Act, there was no mention of any substantial ties between them. Erik thought back, often, to the afternoon he saw the scars on Charles's body for the first time, and the implications in Charles's words, and wondered if he'd been compromised by the obsession with which he'd gone after Angel's secrets. Wondered if he was unable to see with any clarity on this. Time for more hands-on research.

Muñoz and Summers made a comfortable home for themselves in Park Slope, amidst a tree-lined stretch infested with baby buggies. Erik glared up at the charmingly picturesque rowhouse and thought uncharitably of assimilated, upwardly-mobile model minorities. Even Summers wasn't immune, it seemed, against the lure of aspirational gloss.

He rang the doorbell. It was Summers who opened the door, a red-haired toddler babbling happy nonsense in his arms. Erik refused to let his eyes linger overmuch on both the child and the tattoos adorning Summers's upper arms, revealed by the t-shirt he wore.

"I have questions," Erik said. "It's you or Muñoz, I don't care which, but I want answers."

"Yeah, we thought you'd be kicking down our door sooner or later." Summers stepped aside, letting Erik in. "Try being less of a dickbag for a while — Jean's telepathic and I'll fucking throw you out if you make her cry."

"I thought non-telepathic couples weren't usually allowed to adopt telepaths," Erik said, snippy, but allowed himself to be herded into the kitchen.

"'Usually' isn't 'always'. Anyway, it's not like we can't prove that we have psionic aunts and uncles for her to grow up with." Summers jiggled Jean in his arms, making her laugh. "Questions, Lehnsherr. Ask them."

"Were you, Muñoz, and Salvadore the mutants Charles trained?"

"Yup." Summers didn't look as if he cared in the least whether Erik knew. Or, Erik thought, it was just as likely that Summers didn't give a shit about _him_. "Next question?"

"What the fuck are you three up to? Why all the unnecessary drama and the goddamned conspiracy around Shaw?" Erik spread his hands. "Help me understand this, Summers, because the only thing I know for sure is that Charles is involved in this, and I'm half-way convinced you people are some kind of mutant Freemasons."

"Charles changed our lives," Summers said. "He believed in me when I didn't and everyone else though I was gonna die in prison. He taught us we could be more than what they told us we should be, that we didn't have to keep taking shit when we could take the shovel out of their hands and change the score. That being mutants meant we have a gift to do good for ourselves, and everyone like us."

Erik stared at him, thrown. "That... only explains half the story, Summers."

"Not my fault you're a little slow, Lehnsherr." Summers bared his teeth. "You've seen the scars on the Prof's body?"

"Yes," Erik said. "But what—"

"Then you don't need to ask why we're going after Shaw. Now get out, it's time for Jean's nap."

*****

The last few pieces of the puzzle didn't fall into place until he walked out of his apartment building to see Raven Xavier waiting for him, anonymous in discount store clothes and a generic sedan with tinted windows, sunglasses perched on her nose. She waved him over and said, "Hop in, I'll drive you to work."

"Is this the part where you threaten to cut my balls off for despoiling your brother?" Erik said, pulling the seatbelt around himself. "He's not a fucking Victorian maiden."

"Nope. You're going to break his heart into a hundred bloody pieces one day, but that just makes you exactly his type." Raven pulled off her sunglasses and tossed them over her shoulder. "I'm here because Angel said you should know."

"About what?"

Raven's body rippled in waves of blue, reforming itself into the intern he'd met at Shaw Worldwide, the one he'd chased after the night Jason Wyngarde was murdered. Erik tensed, ready to wrap the fucking steering wheel around her neck, but her body changed again into another form: a woman with red hair and scaly blue skin, her eyes a bright, reptilian yellow.

"This is the real me," she said. "I never got around to coming out as a mutant, what with us Xaviers hating stupid rules, which helped a whole fucking lot after we decided to bring down Shaw. Made it easy to infiltrate his organisation."

"'We'?"

"Myself, Angel, Alex, and Armando — as you already know. And two others, but you don't need to know their names for now." Raven shrugged, easy and loose-limbed, but her eyes were predatory. "Shaw had my brother tortured, Detective Lehnsherr. Charles... knew some secrets about him that he'd rather not have out in public. Then he found out about us, what Charles was teaching us to do. Shaw wanted to headhunt us for his own ends, maybe see if he could use Charles's teaching pedagogy. What a fucking joke. When Charles wasn't amenable to either cash or blackmail, he tortured Charles."

"I know Charles was tortured," Erik said, with some difficulty. "I saw the evidence. Why didn't he go to the police? There're more than enough of us mutants in the force to believe he had a case, even if the flatscans won't."

"Oh, really? If they were so goddamn sympathetic, why didn't all these mutants fight harder to keep the Psi Act from going through?" She snorted. "Shaw's a clever, clever man. He never actually had his torturers say anything verbally to Charles, just set it up for Charles to read their minds. Charles could know everything and anything, and still be powerless to do anything about it. At least if he wanted to go through the system."

"So you decided to fill in the gaps." The startling brightness of her hair flickered in the rearview mirror and Erik remembered, _he's been keeping company with a pretty little redhead_. Had Raven pushed Volkov too hard?

"You don't get to judge me on this, Lehnsherr. You weren't the one who had to put Charles together again and watch him die a little every day. We waited a long time to get Shaw and even after everything that happened, we're still doing it by the book, with the investigation into him. Armando says they're close to a breakthrough."

Erik turned to look at her, at the stubborn, proud slant of her face. "And if the wheels of justice let Shaw go?"

"We'll be there, and we'll be ready for him," Raven said. "I don't think I need to tell you that I mean it when I say, 'by any means necessary' — and I've had the practice. The question is: are you in or are you out?" She glanced at him, assessing. "Are you going to be help or hindrance?"

*****

The entire bullpen found excuses to linger at Erik's desk when he tacked up the photo on the commemorative steel tankard that held his pens and stationery. Even MacTaggert cracked something close to a smile, charmed, when she saw it. 

"Cute kids," Angel said, eyebrows raised.

"They're mine. Don't look so surprised."

"Didn't know you have any." She leaned down, looking back and forth between Erik and the photo, clearly trying to see his features in the children. Wanda's face and her red dress were streaked with face paint, and Pietro was adjusting the paper crown on his head. They looked happy. "Where're they?"

"With their mother. I don't get to see them much." He touched a corner of the photograph. Erik had been the one to take the picture, on the twins' third birthday. "Pietro's a speedster. I'm not sure what Wanda is, but last I heard she could change the probability of something happening."

"Your ability's magnetism, yeah? Did they take after their mom?"

"Magda's a flat—" Erik pressed his lips together. "She's not a mutant."

"Huh. Imagine that." Angel looked at his children again. "A caseworker I know said judges tend to give custody of mutant kids to the mutant parent."

"He said my political beliefs were prejudicial to their best interests," Erik said, feeling a ghost of the old, deep hurt. Maybe it would've turned out differently had he asked Magda to marry him when she told him she was pregnant, instead of freaking out in front of witnesses. Or, as Ororo put it, if only he wasn't an asshole. "Need anything, Salvadore?"

"I gotta talk to you about something." Angel lowered her voice and said, "Raven told me about the little tea party she had with you. And what you said to her."

"This fight of yours is not mine," Erik said to Angel, exactly what he told Raven. "But I won't get in the way, and I'll keep your secrets."

Raven had been incandescent with rage. He felt old in the face of her convictions, and tired to the bones. _I can fall in love with Charles_ , he wanted to say to her. _The same way I can, one day, believe in everything you say about Shaw. But I'm not certain._

Angel merely shrugged. "Good enough for me," she said, and Erik knew she would never tell him anything, short of Charles's life being in danger.

He could care about Charles and not put on superhero tights for him, Erik thought. And it would be fine. It would be enough for Charles, as long as he let Charles in. Erik didn't know if _he_ would be fine with it, after the first flush of attraction faded, but he had time. He wanted to find out.

When Raven had demanded that Erik choose, he thought of the way Charles sounded when he was lecturing on something that caught his passion, forgetting for a minute that he would never again speak on a podium with an audience of hundreds. His utter lack of inhibitions in bed, as if he'd gone far beyond anything Erik could do to shame or hurt him. The infinite ocean of Charles's affection and kindness, and how Erik was uncertain still whether to wade in cautiously or push on without care until he hit Charles's limits, so he would at least know what they were. There was so much more they'd yet to discover about each other, not least of which how they wanted to fit together outside their beds.

His cellphone trilled a soft, short melody. It was a message from Ororo, asking if he was free on Friday night. He wondered, suddenly, if it was too soon for him to bring Charles with him to dinner with her. With or without Yukio.

Across from him, Angel sat at her own desk, the investigation file on Volkov spread open, its contents disgorged. Somewhere in the city, Volkov's neighbour, whose dog Volkov walked, was laying a wreath on his unheralded grave. No one had stepped forward to claim Volkov's body but for the neighbour, who paid for the burial. All of them — he and Erik and Angel and even Charles — were stuck cleaning up the mess left behind by those never expecting to be held accountable.

For Angel's sake, Erik thought, he hoped that Shaw was soon gone, one way or the other. He shook off a sudden fit of melancholy and picked up the landline as it rang, plunging him back into the mundane.

  


**END**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The quote at the beginning of the story was taken from Daniel Heller-Roazen's translation of Giorgio Agamben's _Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life_.
> 
> I can't say enough to thank the people who were following this story as I was posting the first draft to Tumblr. You kept me going, guys. Thanks for the likes and reblogs. For the morbidly curious, a large part of the first draft and various odds and ends (including pictures of XMFC's very pretty cast) can be found under [this tag](http://thoughtsnotunveiled.tumblr.com/tagged/homo-sacer) on my Tumblr.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Content notes:** this story contains dialogue and character perspectives on bigotry (including racism and misogynistic undertones) which some readers may find challenging and/or distressing. It contains non-explicit descriptions of torture, and explicit descriptions of the aftermath of torture.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * A [Restricted Work] by [Podcath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Podcath/pseuds/Podcath) Log in to view. 




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